FeelGoodTrader's mission lives on at Copious.com

FeelGoodTrader was closed down in early June, but if you're looking for an alternative without going back to CraigsList, check out Copious: social buying with Facebook integration. Using Facebook as the login system means you aren't dealing with anonymous strangers.

The new Reputation system

The problem is and old one: how do you know if someone will flake out on you? The idea is simple: implement a reputation system that tracks when people flake out.

Today we launched the first version of our new reputation system. It tracks the following three things:

1. The number of items you bought
2. The number of items you sold
3. The number of deals you flaked out on

Everyone starts at 0 reputation. When you buy/sell items on the site, your reputation goes up. When you make someone an offer, but then back out of it (flake out), your reputation goes down. Flaking out is also weighted more heavily than not flaking out, so in order to have a positive reputation score, you have to stick to your word more often than not.

Hot chocolate and trustworthy shopping

by John Bigane / FGT Community

I'm not a shopper...  I've never been much of a shopper.  Every year around the holidays, I fight the urge to listen to Christmas music or start doing any of my Christmas/holiday shopping until after Thanksgiving.  You'll never see me at one of the Black Friday sales.  And then, after the November holiday, I immediately feel behind.  One of my aunts already has her gifts WRAPPED long before Halloween and I won't even have started brainstorming.  Previous years, I've found myself wandering the malls in/around Chicago thinking what I could buy this or that person much to my growing dismay.  Forget my daydreaming of insane consumerism or why Chicago has so many outdoor malls (when most of us are shopping in the dead of winter!), I'd give anything to be done and drinking hot chocolate in front of a warm fire somewhere.

 

As a result, this past year, I, like many others, shopped more on-line than ever before.  Outside of the gifts I made for others, most of the gifts I bought came from Amazon and other on-line services.  Why are web-based retailers' numbers up so much this past holiday?  You can depend on it.  You can trust your transaction and the prices are better than many of the brick and mortar stores.  It was quick... it was easy and I could stay at home, shopping to my heart's content drinking, the aforementioned, hot chocolate.

 

But even buying from Amazon wasn't ideal.  I would have preferred to have done more of my shopping "locally," but away from the malls.  Buying locally has tons of advantages, among them: the ability to support local business in my own neighborhood, it's better for the environment (less shipping fuel and costs), and I can get my items quickly without waiting for them to arrive on-time from across the country and world.

 

Sometimes, buying locally isn't just convenient, it's necessary.  A few months ago after running the Chicago Marathon (I didn't die!), I wanted to buy a couple of the hats volunteers received from assisting at the run.  The buyer I found on a well known web-based service didn't know me from Adam... I didn't trust him/her so we ended up meeting at a random Starbucks in Chicago to make the swap, and I was relieved when the transaction was finally complete.  This type of transaction would have been so much simpler and calmer with a service like FeelGoodTrader.  I could at least have gone into the purchase with some comfort that I was buying from someone from the community, someone that others in the community trusted and had some previous success buying and selling from...and I'll bet some wonderful, tasty, hot chocolate wouldn't have hurt either! :)

Development update: Off-site listings

This week we're completely focused getting more content on the site, and building the community.

The thing we're working on this week is off-site listings - a way to promote your listings on other sites through the FGT site.

So, let's say that you're trying to sell your car, but you're a little nervous about trying to sell it on FeelGoodTrader because there's not a lot of traffic or users right now. We totally get that.

Go ahead and post it wherever you want to post it so you can get your item sold. Then come on over to FGT and simply post the link to your off-site listing on FGT, and use it as a place to promote your currently listing. How does this help you? Simple - when a user comes to FGT and searches for "used car", in the search results they'll find your off-site listing, and head straight to it. That means you can sell your items anywhere on the web that works for you, and users can search for it on FGT and find it in seconds. Better still, when you close your listing on the other site you don't need to come back to FGT to close it. We will automatically detect that the listing is no longer available within 24 hours, and remove it from the FGT database, saving you time.

So you may ask, "Why does this have to be user-submitted? Why don't we just scrape the listings of other sites, and repost them on FGT?" Well, because doing so would be unethical - those sites have spent a lot of time building their community, and we're not interested in just stealing their listings. That's not cool. However, if you post a listing on another site you're perfectly free to promote it any way you want (using FGT off-site listings, Twitter, etc.), in order to drive potential buyers back to you. You can even post a friend's listing to FGT - so long as you're using it as a promotion engine, and not scraping content from another site, then you're good to go.

Look for an update on this feature later this week. As soon as we're ready to push this feature to the site we'll let you know.

Thanks for reading!

Development update

Things are rolling along well at FeelGoodTrader. The most critical features are in place, the nastiest bugs have been squashed.

Here's the top 3 things we'll have on launch day:

• Buy/sell any product or service - just submit it, and start selling it
  (ok, almost, any product or service. We don't do prostitution, drugs, or other illegal activities here)
• Trust-based community, where you're connected to the people and businesses that you want to buy and sell from
• PayPal is our preferred provider for payments. You don't have to use them, but there's plenty of good reasons (security mostly) to use them 

We're thrilled to be launching in just under 21 days! It's getting so close we can taste it!

Trust, scams, and FeelGoodTrader

No matter how educated, experienced, wealthy, or smart you think you are, even the best of us have fallen victim to con games. It's not a matter of if you'll get swindled out of money at some point in your life, it's really just a matter of time. Hopefully it won't be a lot of money, and hopefully you'll become wiser without too much pain.

The internet has only made the creation, running, and maintenance of large scale, distributed con games easier with the mass communication tools we all have available to us for free. The popularity of CraigsList and eBay, among others, has made it clear just how prevalent these schemes have become in relation to the selling or goods and services on the internet. The fact is, con games, and con men, aren't going anywhere.

So, how does FeelGoodTrader plan on dealing with this?

The reality is that people will, given time, try to run scams using FeelGoodTrader. It's inevitable, and accepting that fact goes a long way to not being "surprised" when it happens. If we were surprised that someone was trying to run scams on the service we might not be prepared to deal with them.

So here's what we believe. No matter how big we get, we want you to feel that you know, and can trust the people around you, the same way you would know who to trust in your various social circles. Think of FeelGoodTrader as a way to get recommendations, find cool stuff, and to participate in a community of people that want the same.

When a spammer/scammer rears their ugly head, we'll provide tools for you to deal with it, both as a community and a community member, in the same way that a group of neighbors could band together to address a problem in their neighborhood. When the community has power to keep the riff-raff out, then reliance on super-duper computer algorithms isn't nearly as important.

So what responsibility does FeelGoodTrader take in dealing with spam/scams?

We're members of the community as well, and we use FeelGoodTrader to find cool stuff the same way you do. When we find someone in our circle of trusted users that we don't feelisn't trustworthy, we have the same power to remove that person from our trusted circle as you do. There's no need to send us an email and hope that we'll respond or do something about it - the power will be in your hands, and in the hands of the community of people you choose to be connected with.

So, this means three things: 

1. We take responsibility to research, and build tools for the community to use in order to deal with problem members
2. We will do everything we can to educate the community on how best to use those tools, and rely on the community to help spread that knowledge
3. We will have open conversations about how these tools are working, we will be honest about flaws in the tools, and we'll involve the community in helping to improve them for everyone

So what power/tools will I have at my disposal?

FeelGoodTrader is a system that is built on trust and social networks. At the most fundamental level, it works like this:

You mark someone as "trusted". This person becomes a member of your "trusted" circle of contacts. Over time you will build up a network of these people. Then, that social network works as a filter to keep out the scams, and provide recommendations for who is trustworthy in the community.

So what happens if you run into someone that you don't trust? Simple. Mark them as "not trusted". Not only will that person not be able to buy/sell to you anymore, your feedback is spread to your community of trust people, as a recommendation to avoid that person.

In addition to that, FeelGoodTrader will build additional, back-end systems that help to identify activity on the service that is suspect, and we'll release it to everyone. We believe to our core that a strong community is the best way to deal with spam and scams. That means we want people to take their role as a community member seriously, and when they see a problem they will not only say something, but do something to help everyone have a better experience.

On beta launch day (October 1st) we'll reveal more about how the trust and social network aspects work, and how, as a community, we can pull together to make FeelGoodTrader a great place for everyone. Stay tuned.

Accountability in the hands of the community

FeelGoodTrader wants to build a better way to buy and sell stuff online, where trust in the community is gained by allowing users to hold each other equally accountable.

In episode #62 of This Week in Startups, the CEO of Lunch.com, J.R. Johnson, briefly touches on anonymity vs. accountability, and how he thinks anonymity isn't always what it's cracked up to be. We also posted briefly on the topic of anonymity vs. accountability in a previous post.

So, let's talk about accountability, and why it makes for a stronger community when the power is in the hands of the individual.

Community Members

For the sake of argument, let's talk about three archetypes of community members: The Sheriff, The Outlaw, and The Citizen.

The Sheriff relies on the establishment of rules, and the enforcement of those rules. The Sheriff is motivated by orderly conduct, and people falling into a particular way of living. Communities that are run by Sheriffs are have a long list of rules, and are tightly moderated. The Sheriff creates accountability, and they want everyone to get along. 

The Outlaw relies on the establishment of rules as well so that he can purposely break them. The Outlaw is motivated by the fame and attention that is gained from breaking the rules. Communities run by Outlaws are often wide open, and often have the feeling that they are decaying. The dedicated members consider this the cost of freedom of expression, however, and let it be. The Outlaw ignores accountability, and they don't care if anyone is working together.

The Citizen wants a balance between the two so that order doesn't turn to oppression, and disorder doesn't turn to anarchy. From the Citizen's point of view, the value of the Sheriff is stability and an establishment of a social norm, while the value of The Outlaw is change and the inspiration to reinvent and revolutionize.

When building a functional community, it's important that the leaders be Citizens themselves, playing the role of the Sheriff when building a platform through which the other Citizens can interact, and playing the role of the Outlaw when getting the community involved in matters of freedom and expression (not to mention thinking of ways to prevent the outlaws from running the place).

When Citizens hold each other accountable

When citizens have the ability to hold each other accountable the motivations for sheriffs and outlaws lessens considerably. That is, the sheriffs of the site don't need to be overbearing controllers of everything, and the outlaw members don't feel the need to constantly shake everything up.

As it turns out, giving accountability to the citizens is actually pretty easy. You simply give the Citizens the ability to filter the flow of information that comes to them. This way, if someone is being a jerk you can ignore or block them. On the other hand, if they're adding value then you can promote and follow them. These actions then become the seeds of recommendations and reputation within a community, the connections between the citizens, which defines the community itself.

Giving the citizens power to hold each other accountable is preferable to the other two extremes. When things go well the people using a community site feel like they can move about unrestricted, and when things go poorly (a bunch of outlaws show up and try to ruin your day) you can simply ignore/block them, their power is stunted, and you didn't have to go get the attention of the Sheriff just to get something done.

Trust

Accountability leads to the building of trust, and a lot of this just comes down to building a better way for people to model that trust online. We don't want to make it easier for people to be conned, in fact quite the opposite. We just want to make it possible for people to form trust relationships with others online in a way that strikes that balance between stability, and flexibility.

This is the central idea that FeelGoodTrader is about. It's the "feel good" part of the site, and what makes us different than anything else out there.

Join us by signing up for the beta, and following us on Twitter and Facebook.

Top 3 killer features coming to online communities

Users will begin to demand three things in more and more online services that will transform the way you interact with these services, and your social network as a result.

Ubiquitous online reputation tools

The most important of these three points will be reputation.

Someone will figure out a way to easily, and powerfully integrate a reputation system into just about everything we do. It will be a system independent of any single service, and it will form the foundation of multi-faceted trust, where different people are trusted for different reasons, on different topics, and at various levels simultaneously.

It will enable big things, like forming a collective banning/flagging of scammers and spammers. It will also do little things, for example, you trust your friend Joe's opinion on gadgets, but you don't like his taste in movies. When you shop for digital cameras Joe's top list of models and places to buy them will be right at the top of the list. However, when you're looking for what movie to go see on Friday night, Joe will be nowhere to be found.

It will be natural and automatic, and a system that you can train and retrain over time to give you customized, real-time recommendations on anything you want.

Symmetrical accountability

Let's say you have a bad experience with a company online. You might write a bad review of the company, but the company has no way to write a review of you. Symmetrical accountability means that accountability should go both ways. With symmetrical accountability companies will make use of reputation to find customers that best fit them

So why would you want a company to be able to rate you?

It's simple. If companies can find customers using the same reputation system that you use to find them, they will be able to spend more time serving the customers that fit them well, and building a strong and connected community within that customer base. That means a higher percentage of customers getting great service, and the company spends more time and energy on you.

When we talk about companies avoiding customers don't get too freaked out. We're not talking about companies turning away loyal, paying customers who just have one bad experience. We're talking about the trolls that everyone knows are out there, and who ruin everyone's experience. We're talking about the scammers that post false listings for things for sale. We're talking about people who post fake and misleading pictures of themselves on dating sites. We're talking about people who are dishonest, and make a service less useful for everyone.

Sharing controls will be completely user-centric, and service independent

In the coming years everyone will be able to take privacy into their own hands, and never again need to rely on trusting a 3rd party to manage it for them. Privacy systems, especially when tied to reputation, will allow people to automatically manage what people, groups, and organizations are able to see about them. If this privacy system is in the hands of the open source community, and owned by the people (instead of a company or government), the shared interest of allowing people to be as open or private as they like will put control back into the hands of the individual.

This means all kinds of good things can happen, including not sharing demographic data with advertisers if you don't want to. It can effectively be used to opt-out of advertising from companies you don't like, or advertising altogether.

Final words...

In short, online communities will be able to shape their own destinies to a greater degree, the same way that a group of neighbors in a housing development can decide to work together to make their neighborhood a place where great people come together for a common purpose, and with similar ideals. It's a great big world out there, but more and more, it'll be possible for the net to become a place where your experience is so highly customized to what you're looking for that no matter who you are, or what you're into, you'll feel right at home socializing with people that you know in what will feel like your own private circle of friends and neighbors.

The people speak

It's pretty simple. I don't need to bash the current classified ad solution, or other e-commerce sites that haven't changes much in years, or been innovative in solving some of the problems they've had for years.

Here's a two quick ones for you taken from the conversations happening on Twitter.

CraigsList user complaining that CraigsList is using flagging to censor complaints about the service:

Date: 2010-06-30, 7:17PM EDT

re:speaking of flagging (Lantown...or weevill)

I agree! I hate that it has come to this but since [CraigsList] is a 501-c3 yet does not allow outsiders to attend meetings this is the only outlet for those disgusted to voice opinions. Open the meetings and the books like all other 501-c3's and this will all go away . Flagginfgthese [sic] posts is censorship. Welcome to wee town. Open your meetings to the public little man.

PostingID: 1819823023

@517butterfly laments the "flakers" on CraigsList

I hate being stood up by someone on #craigslist. Seriously I could have had boxes unpacked instead of waiting in this flippin parking lot.

We think it's a clear indication that the community around this site is crumbling pretty quickly. Time will tell.

Online commerce needs a strong, connected community, not a large one

Communities where people care reflect it. They are kept clean and safe, and the people continually add value to them.When you go through any neighborhood in your city there's a look, a feel, and a general sense that you pick up almost instantly, good or bad. Online communities share this aspect with their physical counterparts: when you arrive on a site you instantly make judgments on if the site is a sketchy or attractive place, a place that's well maintained and nurtured, or chaotic and eclectic.

Classified ad communities on the internet, in our opinion, have become like that sketchy neighborhood. They're filled with less than savory characters, the spam is rampant, and the scam-to-legit response ratio deterred many users.

When no one is even trying any more to keep a community growing and vibrant, the community falls apart.Take a look at some of what is being posted on Mahalo that speaks to the fundamentals of what's wrong with interpersonal commerce right now. We use Craigslist in this example, the de facto leader of classified ad sites, but these questions apply equally to many similar services:

The spam and scams are dominating the scene
Classified ad sites have lost their focus
Online classifieds can be unsafe

FeelGoodTrader is the next generation in community commerce. We're building it with a focus on a strong and connected community. Strong and connected communities work together naturally to keep the spam and scams out, while encouraging the good stuff to grow.

We already have a basic "trust" feature on the site (similar to friends/following people on Facebook/Twitter), but coming in May 2011 we plan to roll out an even better set of community-building and trust tools. You can sign up with us today, then check us out on Twitter and Facebook for upcoming news.